


The Length of Forever (Can Be Just One Second)

by mindheist



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-23
Updated: 2014-04-23
Packaged: 2018-01-20 12:15:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1510091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mindheist/pseuds/mindheist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“A real world. How arrogant are you to think yours is the only one? There are infinite more. You have to open your mind. They touch one another, pressing up in a long line of lands, each just as real as the last. They all have their own rules. Some have magic, Some don't. And some <i>need</i> magic. Like this one.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Length of Forever (Can Be Just One Second)

**dimension 1: here and now**

Scott wishes he could say that on the day of Allison’s funeral, the sun shined like the world continued to move on in the grander scheme of things. Instead, it rains.

It is not a downpour. He would have appreciated that more. He would have thanked the angels for wringing out their towels to wipe from Allison’s face the dusts and dirt of of mortal life, drawing the best baths to wash off the pain and blood of being a hunter until the very end. Instead it is uncertain, tentative. Raindrops hit the concrete with a shakiness punctuated with the unsurety of the sun peeking through broken cotton clouds dappling the sky.

Scott wishes he could say that only a few came to Allison’s funeral, so that he could pretend that it didn’t shake his life down to its roots, but what a ludicrous wish that is. 

He walks alone with the masses, sensing Isaac’s presence in the crowd. It is unusually cold in Beacon Hills, the wet wind cutting through wool coats and black gloves and right down to the bone. Several paces ahead of him he sees his mother tuck a hand into his father’s elbow. As he takes the path down the sloping hill into the cemetery he stops to tilt his head up to the sky, a lone lunar face amongst a sea of dewy black umbrellas. 

 

Sheriff Stilinski makes a speech with Stiles beside him. He’s wearing his black police coat, one he usually reserves for funerals of fallen officers. To him, Allison had been as good as any, a seventeen-year-old warrior that had chased down monsters that fought back with more than just guns. 

“Once, Allison had been in the elevator with me in the hospital when I believed that there was not a single shred of hope left in Beacon Hills,” he says. Even with Stiles holding up the umbrella beside him, the hands he grips the sides of the podium with are damp with drizzle. He bites his lip and looks first at Scott, who’s sitting with a blank face in the audience beside his mother, and then at Isaac, who looks only slightly out of place sandwiched between Derek and Chris Argent. “I called her fearless, to which she laughed and replied that I was wrong—that she was terrified.” In his periphery, Scott’s face sparks with a hint of life.

“And I thought—you know, I thought, being a seventeen-year-old girl, of course she would be terrified. I was too, and I’m a grown-ass man who’s been shot at more than I’ve been smiled at. But then she went on to list what she was most afraid of, and I realized just how much I underestimated Allison Argent.

“She was scared for her friends, for their lives. Now I’m not allowed to say why, but she was scared for her family, and for the lack of certainty she lived with. Not one moment,” he breathes, taking in a lungful of chilly December air, “not one moment did she mention that she was scared for herself.”

The sheriff looks down to where Scott is sitting again—and the boy he’d watched grow up with his son has a blazing look on his face. His eyes remain as deep and dark as lakes but there is something so steely and feral about him that Stilinski wonders if grief alone could turn him. 

“Dad,” Stiles murmurs, putting a hand on his father’s shoulder. The sheriff bows his head and mutters a _thank you_ into the microphone before taking the umbrella in his son’s place.

“Now I don’t know about you all,” Stiles says, his booming voice filling the forest and the spaces between threadbare trees, “and what Allison meant to you. If she was just ‘a new girl,’ to you the whole time she was at Beacon Hills High School, or…” He spares a glance at Lydia, whose eyes are glassy but whose face remains as set and fierce as Scott’s. “Or if she was your best friend. It doesn’t matter what she was to you. What matters is that you remember her for what she died for.”

He sees Chris Argent sit up a little straighter, as though ready to spring into action. Stiles has something else in mind.

“I don’t know what you’ve heard about her death,” Stiles goes, knowing he’s breaking rules—again. “I don’t care what you’ve heard, bad or good. Allison Argent was not a girl who carried her own weight in this world. She carried the weights of everyone—hell, she saved my ass more times than you know. She protected those,” he pauses, and looks to Chris for reassurance. Chris does not give any indication for Stiles to continue, nor does he move to stop him. “Who could not protect themselves.”

When the funeral director asks if anyone has any last words, Stiles sees Scott grip the index cards in his hands a little harder. Wordlessly, he shoves them all into the pocket of his coat. He does not stand up, and the chance passes him by. Allison’s casket is lowered into the pit, already dug, and when everyone throws in sprigs of cosmos and forget-me-nots, Stiles sees Scott drop in a measly pen. 

“She might forget again,” he says, almost to himself.

“Maybe,” Stiles says, putting an arm around his best friend’s shoulders. “You never know, right? Maybe in a better world, she’d be the one giving a pen to you.”

 

**dimension 2: length**

Time slows down and stretches all its limbs when Scott bends to pick up the broken silver arrow from Allison’s bow. On the other side of the Oni, Isaac cowers like a child. “Now!” Allison is screaming, but every letter has its own timezone in Scott’s ears. Maybe they’re filled with blood. Maybe that’s why he's living in a world that moves like it is underwater.

In real time, it’s been less than half a second. 

“Scott, now!”

The yellow light that bursts from the Oni’s body is paradoxical to the darkness it embodies when Scott sinks the arrow into its back. Harsh rays cut the night like the sun after a volcanic eruption, and the shriek that rends the air has Isaac writhing on the ground in agony and Scott screwing his eyes shut. In moments, the Oni dissipates into a noxious black smoke. Scott catches a glimpse of a breathless half-smile on Allison’s face before a sharp, burning pain erupts in his lower abdomen.

Something warm and sticky sheets down his belly. Even here, Scott can hear Lydia’s scream pierce the the calm.

_“Scott!”_

It echoes. Time slows again, stretching like a lazy cat. 

The sword leaves Scott’s body in a haze of pain. The world swims and he feels blood bubble up in his throat. His body doesn’t meet the ground like he expects it to—instead, his head hits something soft and warm. Even with dark spots clouding his vision, Scott recognizes the painfully familiar cradle of Allison’s arms. 

“Oh, my God.” Her voice is shaking as hard as she is, and when she brings her hand up to cup Scott’s cheek he sees it stained with telltale black goo from his wound. He coughs when he tries to force words from his lips and Allison simply smiles through the tears gathering in her lashes and wipes away the black ooze that keeps spilling from his mouth.

“It’s okay,” Scott rasps. Allison chokes on a broken sob, face like shattered glass. “It’s okay. It’s perfect.”

 

**dimension 3: space**

In the 25th Hunger Games, Allison Argent is voted as the most brilliant female tribute of District 2 and Scott McCall as the only male tribute that would die to protect her—or, more importantly to the interests of their District, her chances of winning. His mother and best friend Stiles had been the the sole two people that fought to take his place—but, as per the rules of the First Quarter Quell, only those voted in by their own people went to the Games. 

On the train ride to the Capitol, Allison finds that she cannot bring herself to even look in the direction of Scott’s room. 

“It won’t do you any good to keep thinking about how it could have been different, Allison.” She turns, fingernails still pinched between her teeth and comes face to face with a stout, dark-skinned man with kind eyes. He takes her wrist and pulls her hand away from her mouth. “I’m Deaton. I will be a mentor to you and Mr. McCall for these Games.”

“I can’t forgive myself for—”

Deaton presses a cold finger to her lips. “Again, it will do you no good. You’re an Argent, the last daughter in a long line of famous Careers. Can you imagine what Scott would have done if he hadn’t been voted to be male tribute?”

Allison sighs when Deaton brings his finger away. She notices with a twist in her gut that his hand is made entirely of gleaming titanium, and the reality of death suddenly becomes excruciatingly real—despite having been exposed to all the clips of gore and killing in training. Her father always did say that, “for an Argent, you have an inconvenient amount of heart.”

“Okay,” she whispers. “Where do I need to start?”

 

For much of Allison’s life, Scott has been the scruffy boy that always trailed after her, clamoring to play with her bow and arrows. His family, made up of only his mother, couldn’t quite scrape together the expenses to send him to District 2’s most elite Career academies. He’d built his stamina and physique ground up, completely from personal discipline and basic training at school.

“You look good,” Allison says stiltedly, gesturing to the thin fabric woven through with silver thread draped over Scott’s shoulders. The Opening Ceremony is set to start in a minute. “Ridiculous, but good.”

“I’ve never seen you wear a dress in my life,” Scott says, smiling faintly. “So, the same to you. Shame Isaac doesn’t get to see it in real life.”

“Please don’t talk about Isaac right now,” Allison says, taking Scott’s hand. Her heart pounds in her throat and she has just enough of it left to notice how soft his hand is in her calloused one. 

 

The arena is designed to have extreme changes in the force of gravity. Allison wakes up one morning to find herself floating, quite literally, in the clouds. She turns her head, her hair hanging around her face as though suspended in water, and realizes that there is something tying her down by the ankle.

She reaches to grab the blue and orange nylon cable double-knotted at her foot and begins reeling herself back down, slowly. Quietly she unlatches the Chinese ring dagger from her belt in case this is a trap, and lowers herself inch by inch. 

“Allison?”

It’s Scott’s voice. 

“Allison, it’s fine. It’s just me.”

Scott has both his ankles tied to a thick tree branch. He’s standing up with a hand outstretched, and Allison frowns. 

“If anyone attacked you, you would be dead before you could even try to run.”

“Have you tried running in zero gravity? It’s impossible. Gravity affects gas particles too, without gas you can’t hope to get anywhere.”

“So...how can we still be breathing?” Allison asks. 

“I don’t know,” Scott replies, staring into the foggy mist around them. “I don’t know.”

 

Eventually Allison uses the change in gravity every 9.81 hours to her advantage. Scott ties her down in a place crawling with tributes and she readies her bow and arrow. Scott uses the heat-sensitive glasses he had gotten in his pack at the Cornucopia and tells her where the other floating tributes are, whispers, and she finds their targets with arrows tipped with nightlock juice.

More than once they pass floating bubbles and orbs of blood staining the clouds pink.

 

Allison is starting to realize that she could kill Scott any second and that, eventually, she might have to. She’s sure Scott knows it, too, yet here he is. He still has a massive wound across his left hip from a monstrous wolf that had attacked them, when gravity had multiplied so much that they were thrown to the ground and could barely lift a finger from the forest floor. It's healing—slowly. With work and time it would be nothing more than an ugly scar. 

It’s become harder to predict the gravitational changes. Ever since it had become obvious that the tributes had figured out the intervals at which they occurred, the Gamemakers decided to implement them whenever they so damn wished. 

Right now, they’re on the forest floor again, ropes noosed loosely around their ankles. They’re concealed, at least, by thick foliage. Allison watches as Scott tries vainly to twist his arm back far enough to untie the simple knot tying him to the tree above them.

“You might as well give up,” Allison says, words slurred by the intense gravitational pull. Her head is light and she is short of breath. “Wait until it passes.”

“Well, well,” comes a rasping voice. “What do we have here?”

“Shit,” Scott hisses. “Shit.”

“Who is it?”

“I have to say, Scott, you are good at hiding the little queen of the Capitol there.” Allison feels the heavy bootfalls near her and sets her jaw. “Deucalion. I’m not sure if we’ve met?”

“Get away from her,” Scott snarls.

“In case you’re wondering, I’m from District 4. Fishing. Deep sea fishing, actually, so this gravitational hullabaloo really is just a big laugh.” Even from here, Allison can see him pull two barbed hook blades from his belt. “Now, who first? The queen or her consort?”

“Deucalion, you’re out of your goddamn mind,” Scott spits. 

“Oh, I am, pushing the limit this much. I maybe have a minute, maybe even less, before we get back to normal gravitational pull, so maybe I should get a move on. Don’t you think so?”

Allison convulses when the hooked blades meet both sides of her neck, cutting her jugular and coronary artery open like slicing through high-pressure industrial hoses. Scott’s shout tears at the forest's seams, and suddenly he’s turning her over into his lap and Allison finds that she can move again.

Deucalion is gone. 

Scott’s hands are stained with red as he tries to stem the flow on both sides of Allison’s neck. The more she gasps, the more she looks like a fish out of water with gills breathing out nothing but blood, and even through her swimming vision she laughs. 

“Why are you smiling?” Scott asks. His face is streaked with dirt but his tears wash clean tracks down his cheeks. 

“Because it doesn’t hurt.”

 

To the fury of District 1, Scott wins the First Quarter Quell when their tributes turn on each other, thinking that all others were dead. For a triumphant moment, Kali, the female tribute, had stood up with a smug smile on her blood-dotted face. Scott struck her then with one of Allison’s lethal arrows that he had taught himself to use after she had bled to death in his arms. 

It’s hard to face Isaac when he gets back home. Everyone is cheering for him except for his mother and Stiles. With Isaac, Scott doesn’t exchange much more than an apologetic look and a half smile. 

Isaac catches Scott's hand as they pass each other and he turns around, waiting for the storm to come. It doesn't. 

"I know this should be about you," Isaac says, not looking him in the face. "But it's not. Don't feel sorry for yourself. Don't make her death just another one of them among the hundreds that have passed and the thousands that will come."

"I—"

"Mourn for the loss of a daughter," Isaac says fiercely. "And a friend. Lydia's been a mess. Mourn for the loss of a girl who loved life, despite all her training. Mourn for the loss of someone who died a hero, because I don't think you know, Scott—she saved your life. If she hadn't tended to your wounds after that wolf attack, you would have been dead in that dirt. She could've let you die."

"I know she was a hero," Scott mutters. "All my life, she was."

Isaac let go of his wrist. He sighs, but sounds satisfied. 

"Thanks, Isaac." He pauses. "And about what she said before she—she died—I..."

Isaac snorts. "Scott, you can't tell me you didn't know that she loved you from the very beginning."

 

**dimension 4: space time**

“Well, she’s looking good,” says Melissa McCall, scrutinizing the gray-blue mass haloed by a smudged ring of black. “You can see her fingers.” Tiny little phalanges that look like webbed feet appear on the ultrasound screen. She slides the probe over Kira’s swelling abdomen and there is a smile on her face when she puts it down, only to see the blank expressions of both her son and his wife.

“Oh—God, sorry, did you not want to know the gender?” she says. “I’m—so sorry, guys, I didn’t realize—”

“No, no Mom, it’s okay. Actually, we were...” Scott says, looking at Kira, who meets his gaze with something akin to wonder. 

“Allison,” they say simultaneously. 

 

Allison Yumiko McCall comes into the world without much fanfare if everyone disregards the part where she was born in the back of Stiles’ (new) Jeep. The only objection he’d made about this was, “God this can _not_ be sanitary,” while Lydia collapsed the truck bed of the Jeep for more room. 

Kira hadn’t been due for another two weeks. It’s a miracle how fast Scott’s mother had gotten to the forest beside the animal clinic, to which Scott had decided would be closer than the hospital. The first plan had been to “just carry her and run there” since Scott’s car had been totaled by a drunk driver and Kira’s parents both had been at work. Stiles said this plan was not only dangerous but also completely ridiculous. He’s scared to think of what would have happened if Deaton and his mother hadn’t been there, or if Lydia hadn’t been in the car to help—

“Hey.”

Scott jumps when he feels Stiles’ hand land on his shoulder with a firm clap. He holds out a cup of tea from the hospital cafeteria. “Drink this. You still look ready to jump out of your skin.”

“That was so close back there, Stiles,” Scott breathes, and he finds that his hand is still shaking. “If you hadn’t been there—or if my mom, or Deaton—”

“Now is not the time to think about what could have happened, since for once, a bad thing didn’t happen,” Stiles says. “Now you gotta admit that is kind of a new thing for us.”

Scott brings the cup to his lips. 

“She’s beautiful,” Stiles continues, tilting his head towards the tiny little bundle wrapped up in the bed next to Kira, who’s asleep. Her hair is still matted and stuck to her neck in some places. “Your. Daughter, I mean.” He inhales. “Allison, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Who do you think she’ll take after?”

Scott turns his head. 

“Don’t tell me you’ve never thought of that, Scott. Genetically, you’re a wolf, and genetically, Kira’s a fox. Except kitsunes can only be trueborn, and werewolves can be trueborn if it’s in their parents’ genes. And, if I recall correctly, foxes and wolves haven’t exactly mixed well in our experiences.”

“Oh, God,” Scott says. Stiles squeezes his arm hard enough to pull him back to reality.

“No, do not start panicking again,” Stiles says. “It’ll be fine. Okay? She’s fine. She’s...she’s something.”

 

Neither of them bring up the the unsaid question for almost two decades, not until Allison is nearly seventeen years old—the same age at which her namesake left their world.

“What is there in Japanese folklore about reincarnation?”

Kira looks up from the tax return documents strewn across the dinner table. Scott looks over his laptop and Kira sighs. She reaches up to take her glasses off, folding them neatly under her hands. 

“There is very little,” she said. “Believed in and practiced by even fewer. It crosses over with some Buddhist beliefs, and even then it’s become diluted because of how amalgamated Shinto and Buddhism became. But in some Shinto religions, they believed that reincarnation, or rebirth, happened to supernatural or celestial beings caught in an eternal cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Their roles were to bring the beliefs of Buddhism and Shinto to different civilizations,” and Kira pauses here. “And to teach compassion to those they meet.”

Scott leans back. “Hm.”

“She still shows no signs of being a kitsune,” Kira says. “I mean, you would have seen it by now, of course—shes’s not Thunder, not Celestial, not Wild. And she hasn’t turned a single time her life.”

“She doesn’t look anything like—like.”

“Reincarnations don’t necessarily need to look like what they were in past lives,” Kira says. “They don’t even need to born into the same species. I mean, you could’ve been a potato in your past life for all we know.”

“Thank you.”

“You know what I mean,” and Scott is reminded of the time her father announced her crush on him to the whole class. 

A lull falls over them, punctuated by the sound of simmering stew on the stove.

“Do you think we should ever tell her?” Scott asks.

“I don’t think we need to,” Kira replies, putting her glasses back on. “I think, deep down, she already knows.”

 

**dimension 5: a possible world**

“What if I told you,” Allison says, twiddling her thumb back and forth with Scott’s as they get ready for their twentieth round of thumb war tonight, “that humans rarely ever come our way?”

“Well,” Scott says, pinning her down for a mere second. She wrenches her finger from his. “I would say you were a liar.”

“Stiles found his way in here, didn’t he?”

“That is true,” Scott says. “Well. I guess rarely is a pretty key word.”

They’re seated on the warm, splintered wood of the balcony on the highest floor of the bathhouse. The summer night is balmy, but at least out here, suspended over ocean, it’s cool. Even the tatami mats inside offer little relief from the heat and Allison keeps her hair wet after her bath so it cools her head. Over them, the moon shines down upon the quiet house. 

“You say rarely,” Scott says, thumb lunging half-heartedly now for Allison’s. “So there must have been some before Stiles, right? Other humans that have wandered by accident into the spirit world. What then? What does the Nogitsune do with them?”

“They remain here long enough to become spirits themselves,” Allison says quietly, shaking her head like it is obvious. “No one is ever quite smart or brave enough to come to the end of the tunnel to search for them. If they were, and, to my knowledge, there were none, they never found their way out across the ocean. You’re the first one who might actually be able to do it.”

“Might?”

“Just because you’re a wolf spirit doesn’t mean you’re invincible,” Allison says, shrugging. Their thumbs have fallen still and their hands rest intertwined on the pillows and blankets they’ve spread out. Inside the bedroom there is a slight commotion as several sleepy voices disturb the quiet with complaints of “Stop kicking me!” and “I didn’t kick you, he did!” They both peer in through the sliding doors to see Stiles strewn across three beds on the floor. Several of the girls, though disgruntled, have given up their sleeping spaces to him.

“I’m not a real spirit, Allison,” Scott reminds her. “I’m just not completely human. That’s the only reason the Nogitsune hasn’t smelled my presence here.”

“There you go,” she says. “You’re even less invincible than we thought, so be careful. The plan for tomorrow—”

“You distract the Nogitsune while I take Stiles and get out of here,” Scott repeats from memory.

“Yes,” Allison says. “I mean, it won’t be easy. Nothing much escapes the Nogitsune’s notice. But he likes me, so I’ll try my best. We need to do it in the evening, though.”

“Evening?”

“Yeah. The Nogitsune likes looking at the fireflies,” she offers for an explanation. “More than anything.”

 

Scott has to admit that the closer the evening draws, the more nervous he becomes. The usual coming of spirits across the riverbed cannot help him smile like it usually does, and some of them even wave to him, having come to recognize him as the wolf boy spirit who always followed the prettiest ward. 

“Okay, the Nogitsune will get up from his nap in about fifteen minutes, so that’s all the time we have,” Allison says in a hushed voice. The three of them are congregated outside, right where the river is due to start filling up soon. “He’s most confused when he first wakes up because there’s so many spirits coming in, so he won’t notice right away if Stiles is missing.”

“Got it,” they say. 

“Stiles, run down the hill for a second and tell me if the light is on or not in his room.”

“Will do.”

Allison looks long and hard at Scott, and takes his hand. “You have to promise me to not look back, no matter what happens. You cannot look back until you pass through the tunnel back into the human world. Under the circumstance the Nogitsune finds out, he might do terrible things to your minds—induce hallucinations and make you see things that aren’t there. No matter what, you have to keep running. You have to promise me.”

“Don’t look back. I promise.”

Allison’s eyes are dark and her expression unreadable. For a moment Scott feels like she has something else on the cusp of her lips, but then Stiles comes trotting back up the grassy hill.

“His window is dark.”

“Good. You guys need to go now. Hurry.”

“Allison, I just, thank you for everything, thank you for saving me, saving—”

“Thank Scott for that. He’s the one who saved you, now go!”

Scott feels his hand slip from hers and he turns and _runs._ The river is filling rapidly, the water tugging at the hems of their pants. Scott wants so much to look back but he takes Stiles’ cold hand in his and they run until they make it to the other bank.

“Through the tunnel! She said we’re not safe until we make it through that!”

It feels like an eternity in the damp darkness of the abandoned underpass tunnel that Scott had first come through with Stiles. It had felt like another lifetime. Their gasping breaths surround them in the cramped space. Thankfully, Scott hears nothing out of the ordinary—no screaming, no cries for help. 

It’s sudden when they burst through the other side and the sun is beating down upon their backs relentlessly. Stiles lets his hand fall from Scott’s and he strides over to his Jeep, covered in leaves and tree sap.

“Oh, God, this is going to be impossible to explain to the university,” he says, using a branch to whack off the spiderwebs that have collected along the windowframes and headlights. “Come on, Scott, we’ve got college to attend.”

But Scott is still standing at the yawning mouth of the underpass, staring into the darkness. It seems to breathe back into his face, and he swears if he listens hard enough he can hear voices inviting him back in. 

“Scott!”

He jumps, and stumbles backward as he’d been leaning forward. 

“Hey, you all right?”

“Yeah, yeah I’m—coming.”

“Seventy-nine missed calls and fifty-two texts from Lydia Martin, fifteen missed calls from Derek Hale, a hundred and twenty-four from my dad…” Stiles puts his phone down onto the console as he turns his key in the ignition. “God, we’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”

 

**dimension 6: all possible worlds**

When Lord Argent enters his daughter’s bedroom to see her so pale that she blends into her sheets, he understands the fragility of the thread she is hanging by. 

“Allison,” he says, taking her hand. It is freezing, no longer thrumming with life as it usually did, as if the forests of Mirkwood thrived right under her very skin. “Allison, you should have gone to the Undying Lands. There is nothing for you here.”

“He’ll come back,” Allison says, pushing herself into a sitting position. “He will.”

“You once single-handedly saved the Hobbit and his fellowship that was en route to destroy the One Ring from Black Riders,” says Lord Argent. “It was a noble thing to do and I would have expected nothing less of you. But what is left for you here if you are too weak to do even that?”

“Hope is left here.”

“Allison, you don’t seem to understand what mortality means,” her father said. “Even if Scott is crowned king above all odds—if the Hobbit can destroy the One Ring and they can defeat an army of orcs, get through Saruman, and defeat Sauron—he is nothing more than human. And for a few mere decades you will get to spend with him as he grows older and older, while you age not a year over seventeen. What then, when he dies? Will you stand at his grave forever, waiting for the day that you waste away once and for all?”

“Father,” Allison says. Her expression is hard and unforgiving, and she reminds him so much of her late mother. “You don’t seem to understand the value of life in the face of immortality.”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you ever thought, all these millennia, what the meaning of life is?” she asks. “Maybe the question has crossed your mind a several times, but have you ever truly looked for the answer?”

“Allison—”

“The meaning of life,” she says, squeezing his hand in her icy one, shaking it gently so that he listens, “is to give life meaning. And that is what Scott has given me.”

“You’re the daughter of a lord, Allison. A descendant of kings of high elves. Scott is a mortal, and you a warrior.”

“And I won’t be if you send me away,” she says. “There is no reason to remain a warrior in the Undying Lands.” 

Lord Argent sighs. 

“You understand now, Father?” she asks. “What meaning is there as an immortal if there is nothing to live for?”

 

Scott just barely survives the Battle of the Morannon. When Allison asked Stiles what had happened, he’d put a hand on her shoulder and said, “Some people just can’t be replaced." Allison had felt her world sway.

Scott chose that moment to walk in with his entire torso bandaged, looking bewildered and lost. 

“But luckily,” Stiles had continued, smiling, “some don’t have to be.”

 

**dimension 7: big bang**

Orion Dawn is designed in the same fashion as most Jaegers are in the Icedomes of the Arctic Circle—with sleek edges, glimmering white-and-blue steel bodies, and strong Hydraulicasters that blast a mix of ice and acid.

“This was made just for us?” Scott says, running his hand up and down the cold metallic foot of their very own Jaeger. It’s powered down and headless at the moment, but he still can’t quite wrap his around the idea he and Allison no longer have to fight in the clunky Mark-II Jaeger than had lost both owners against a Class 4 kaiju. 

“My father has a lot of power in the Jaeger construction industry,” Allison says, helmet balanced loosely on her hip. “When he found out that I was fighting in a defective one, he said that ‘I’d much rather know that you died with honor than because your Jaeger malfunctioned mid-fight.’”

“Harsh.”

“Well,” Allison says, shrugging one shoulder. “He is who he is. After my mother died in combat he locked up all his feelings.”

“Isn’t losing your partner pilot supposed to be devastating?” Scott asks. 

“Yeah,” Allison replies. “Like losing a limb.”

 

The first time they pilot Orion Dawn together, they help Lydia and Jackson take down a Class 3 since Stiles and Derek are still out of commission. 

“I hate what the helmets do to my _hair,_ ” complains Lydia, fluffing out her braids. She looks as though she’d just stepped out of a light breeze. 

“You look fine,” Jackson says. 

“Are you blind?” Lydia shoots back.

“Listen, McCall,” Jackson says, planting a finger in the middle of Scott’s armored chest, “you stay out of our way next time. We could have taken that beast down in half the time if you hadn’t been meddling with it and making it angry.” He looks at Allison, who’s standing beside Scott, awkwardly bows his head, and stalks off. 

“I’m sorry he isn’t potty-trained,” Lydia deadpans. 

 

Orion Dawn sees many casualties. More than once she has entire parts of her body replaced, with additions of retractable swords and hydraulic turbines. The worst comes during a fight with a Class 4 kaiju that they share alongside Lydia and Jackson, Ethan and Aiden, and Stiles and Derek. 

The worst, and the last.

They both wince in pain when the Kaiju constricts the torso of Orion Dawn in one of its many fists. Scott struggles for breath and he feels more than hears Allison gasping for air beside him. 

“Powering Hydraulicaster,” she chokes out, slamming her fist down on a round blue button on her side of the panel. Since Scott is on the right, he waits until there is a cool ping that says the gun is ready and swings up with his right fist with all his might to find the body of the kaiju, just as ice and acid blasts from the Jaeger’s palm. 

There’s a screech of pain and protest, and Scott's lungs open up again when it releases them. Through the cracked windshield of their Jaeger, they see Stiles and Derek in Spitfire Zero launch of volley of crackling missiles square into the kaiju’s face.

Scott lets a smile tug at his lips and he thinks that it might be Allison smiling first. It’s a brief respite, the eye in the storm. 

It’s quiet, quiet in the Drift. Just him and Allison.

The surface beneath them disappears when the kaiju grips the head of Orion Dawn and rips it clean off its body. Allison’s scream ricochets off the insides of Scott’s temples, and he can’t discern his shout of pain from hers and the panicked feed from the connected Jaeger intercoms. They land in the sea with a rattling bob.

“We’re disconnected,” Allison says, voice deathly calm. The head vessel is filling rapidly with water as they begin to capsize.

“What do we do? The head vessel has nothing but escape pods and isn’t equipped with any weaponry,” Scott shouts over the alarms. 

“It has one attack mechanism,” Allison said. “I asked my father specially to have it built in. It could work since we’re still close to the kaiju.”

“Okay, tell me how it works! We’re running out of time!”

Allison pulls off her helmet then and looks into Scott’s face. He’s about to yell that she needs to show him how it works when he sees something like an apology in her eyes. Sadness lines her lips and it hits him what it must be.

“Allison, no,” he says, voice barely audible over the rushing water. “Allison. Stop. You can’t do this.”

"Someone has to stay behind and activate it, Scott."

She never takes her eyes off his face. Her mouth never moves, but Scott hears clear as water, _I love—I love you. Scott McCall._

Allison’s hand moves so fast he barely sees it, but it’s only after he hears _“activating right-side escape pod,_ through the din does he realize what she’s done.

“Allison! Allison, _no—!_ ”

Even in the escape pod, Scott can feel the ocean being rocked from miles below when the head of Orion Dawn self-detonates. From the glass window of his escape pod he sees the kaiju engulfed in blue flames before it finally collapses upon an iceberg, twitching and bloody. 

 

Later, when Lydia and Stiles manage to drag Scott out of his escape pod, they find that his left arm has lost all mobility. 

 

**dimension 8: infinity**

The bomb is scheduled to explode in the next two minutes and Scott doesn’t have time to stop and make any decisions. After he has come this far, acting over thinking has become instinct to him. 

“I’ll take it over the bay,” Scott says, hooking a steel cable to the atom bomb resting in the back of the truck. “If I can get far enough, Gotham will be safe.”

“Put it on autopilot, program it to fly out as far as it can—”

“There is no autopilot in The Bat,” Scott says, looking into Catwoman’s masked face. “Allison Argent.”

She steps back as she takes it in, and emotion flickers in her eyes for only a moment. “You could have saved yourself. You could have gone anywhere in the world,” she says, “but you’re here, saving this shithole of a city. Why?”

“I could ask you that same question, couldn’t I?”

She leans in so abruptly that Scott has no time to duck away. She’s kissing him and for the first time it feels real—no politics, no motives. For a fleeting second he thinks he tastes something like longing on his tongue before she’s pushing him away and running to her motorcycle, hair streaming out behind her.

“I guess this is goodbye once and for all,” says Officer Deaton as the hood of The Bat descends over Scott. “How can you leave without letting Gotham know who the real hero always was?”

“That’s the thing about heroes, Deaton,” Scott says. “They can be big. They can be small. They are everyday occurrences and, more often than not, those heroes go unnoticed—like the ones that put their coats over the shoulders of children who need little more than hope and reassurance. How am I any different?”

The Bat’s engines power up and as it’s lifting off into the air, Deaton backs away from the gusts. In the farthest reaches of his memories he remembers a dark rainy night, and he remembers draping his officer’s jacket over the frail shoulders of a boy who understood, with a haunting maturity, what love and loss meant. 

“Scott McCall,” he pieces together, aloud.

 

When Stiles sees a building along the coast explode in a puff of black smoke and orange flame, he yells, “Get down! It’s coming!”

“You were right, officer!” shouts a tiny girl at the very back of the bus. “He _is_ coming!”

She points with her finger out the window, fingertip smushed backwards with how hard she’s pressing on the glass. Stiles walks over, peering out, and sees a large black hovercraft zooming past the bridge with the spherical bomb suspended twenty feet below. By the time Stiles has managed to leap off the bus and onto the bridge, The Bat has already cleared the harbor. 

It grows smaller and smaller, becoming but a speck on the horizon. Gotham is nearly silent, breaths held for an explosion that will never come. 

Then, the skyline lights up white and Stiles ducks under the railing of the bridge, shielding himself momentarily before inching back up again. 

Far, far in the distance is a serene white mushroom cloud, the last of Gotham’s dark knight.

 

Stiles resigns from law enforcement shortly after.

“I don’t know what I can say to convince you to stay,” Deaton says, “though I’m not sure that I have the shame to ask you to stay at all.”

Stiles nods. “I’m sorry, Officer. I wish I could say it was my life goal to chase the bad guy, but after that,” he points out at the horizon, “I’m not sure I’m cut out for any more genocidal moguls.”

“Where will you go?”

“I don’t know,” Stiles says, handing his badge to Deaton. “A place for new beginnings, I guess.”

 

Florence, Italy, lives up to the quaint pictures Stiles has seen of it in travel books. He thanks the waitress of the cafe as he’s seated and his order his taken, and he pulls his phone out from his pocket. On the front page of the local news app is an article about a revealing of a statue made in the likes of Gotham’s savior. It’s remarkable, carved entirely of black marble, and the likeness of it to the real Batman is uncanny. Officials stand around it, shaking hands and taking credit they do not deserve. Stiles scrolls down. _Bat Light Fixed and Illuminated One Last Time: In Memoriam,_ says the next article. He sighs, putting his phone down as his drink arrives. 

As he brings up the mulled sweetness to his lips, he catches sight of someone a few tables away, sitting with a beautiful young girl who’s laughing with the waiter. That someone looks right at him and nods, and something about him is so familiar that Stiles swears that he’d known him. 

Perhaps, Stiles thinks, sipping his drink, he had. 

 

**dimension 9: all infinities**

Allison wakes with a start. When she comes to her senses she notices that she isn’t in a bed but against someone’s chest and frankly curled up in an extremely uncomfortable position, with muscles aching in places she didn’t know she had muscles.

She’s on top of Scott, who, at the moment, remains in deep sleep.

They’re lying in the backseat of her car. A feeling of déjà vu comes over her and she gingerly extricates herself from Scott’s arms before quietly opening the door and stepping out. 

The car is parked at an edge of the cliff in the forest that they always met at, but when she looks over the drop there is nothing but clouds and fog. Allison stumbles back, startled, and knocks right into something solid.

“Whoa, are you okay?” Scott asks, voice bleary. “What are you doing?”

“Where are we?” she asks, confused. “What is this? What’s going on?”

Scott looks over the edge with her. “Well, you left way before me, and before I had a chance to do this,” Scott says, voice bemused. “So I thought that it would be nice if the first thing I did when I finally got here was to let you wake up with me, like you said you always wanted.”

 

**dimension 10: edges of imagination**

“Here.”

The girl has wavy dark hair. She’s also currently holding out a very much needed pen, red with a black rubber grip, between her index and middle fingers. He wonders how she had known.

“Thanks,” he says as he takes it, and somehow, he feels like this has happened before—maybe a little differently, maybe in stranger ways, maybe after a hellish night that might have been but a dream, maybe in another lifetime that he can’t quite grasp, in memories just a bit beyond his reach—but it has happened. 

“I’m Scott.”

She smiles and her cheeks dimple. 

_There’s no such thing as fate._

_There’s no such thing as werewolves._

“Allison. Allison Argent.”

**Author's Note:**

> \- based on [this](http://haydeenseek.tumblr.com/post/47447844608), [this](http://jessiphia.tumblr.com/post/80655452704/teen-wolf-future-headcannon-scott-and-kira-are-married), and [this](http://deduceme.tumblr.com/post/64550452863/the-point-of-fics-set-in-alternate-universes-are)  
> \- based also on quantum physics’ string theory of [10 dimensions of reality](https://blogs.oracle.com/bblfish/entry/the_10_dimensions_of_reality)  
> \- summary is a quote by the mad hatter in _once upon a time_ , title inspired by the white rabbit from _alice in wonderland_  
>  \- the name _yumiko_ in this case is taken to mean “archery child,” or can be understood by its separate kanji, “reason,” “beautiful,” and “child”  
>  \- just to clear any possible confusion!!! dimension 1 is future canon, dimension 2 is alternate reality, dimension 3 is hunger games first quarter quell au, dimension 4 is future canon, dimension 5 is spirited away au, dimension 6 is lord of the rings au (high fantasy with secondary world through a portal/passage from a primary world and high fantasy wherein no primary world exists respectively), dimension 7 is pacific rim au, dimension 8 is dark knight rises au, and dimension 9 is future canon in which allison finally wakes up with scott


End file.
